1. Field of Technology
The presently disclosed embodiments are directed to encoding network maps with temporal network status information.
2. Brief Discussion of Related Art
Network management tools typically provide fault management, which is generally shown graphically on a network map or topological view. The map or topology view can include boxes and lines, where the boxes represent network devices and the lines represent network links or connections between devices. The maps or topology views can assign a single color to the boxes and lines to identify a single status, such as a current status or possibly the highest status previously achieved by the boxes and links. For example, the color green may be used to indicate a good state and the color red may be used to indicate a bad state.
For performance management, the topological views representing the performance of devices and links or sub-entities are often not implemented. If such views are available, it typically only provides an entry point to separate graphs that can be displayed showing, for example, traffic information with the time as one coordinate axis and a traffic parameter as another coordinate axis. Using this conventional approach, the user typically has to perform a step-by-step investigation from traffic graphs to text graphs showing the performance numbers. This approach is typically time consuming, error prone, inefficient, and burdensome for users that wish to find and extract relevant information from these graphs.